Don't Forget to Kick the Tires

Cale Hamer
Product Manager, Global Talent Management
Ultimate Software

Over the years that I have been involved in the Talent Management space, I’ve had the pleasure of working with many great people and many great organizations in growing the concept of understanding and developing the talent within their organizations. In doing so, I have been constantly amazed at one of the items that organizations struggle with or flat out ignore: The understanding of who their candidates and employees really are as individuals, i.e. how they achieve success versus just what they accomplish. Some organizations are able to capture “what” the individuals do daily or have accomplished in the past, but very few organizations compliment this with understanding “how” they accomplish these things, what makes them unique and how to build upon that. To me, this is really missing out on a key component of not only understanding the full picture of a person’s talent, but also to put the right talent in your organization and develop them once they’re a part of it.

Seeing this reminds me of buying a car. Typically when people buy a car they gather all the data about the car such as the make, model, interior, electronic components, etc. These are the “whats” of the car. These things are very visually evident and are tenable by nature. Though, if you are a good car buyer you don’t stop there. You also look at the abstract items; such as how will this get through the snow, or does this car represent my personality? By doing this, you actually understand the individuality of the car. It allows you to decide which car would best suit your personal needs.

So, if we as consumers take the time to understand the individuality of the car we are buying why is it that we as organizations don’t apply this same principle to our Candidates and Employees? The lifeblood of our businesses? During the talent acquisition stages are you focused solely on identifying what they have done in previous roles that would qualify them now? Or are you considering how they achieved certain milestones regardless of the task at hand. Once they are onboarded and embedded into the organization are you collaboratively identifying perceived strengths and weaknesses and coaching them on how they can improve and move along their career path?

Ask yourself these questions:

• What are the key strengths or competencies of this individual that make them who they are?

• How have they utilized these strengths to succeed in a task that someone without these strengths would fail?

• Am I putting this person in the best position to utilize their inherent strengths, or am I putting them in a position in which I am trying to minimize their weaknesses?

If you ask yourself these questions and understand how an individual is successful in addition to what they have succeeded in, you will be setting your organization and the individuals within it up for success.

This is something we’re passionate about and spend a lot of time thinking about at Ultimate. We’re focused on building a talent solution that focuses on providing insight into who a person really is and how they achieve success. We believe that not fully understanding each person is no worse than, pardon the analogy, buying the wrong car and ending up stuck in the mud.

I look forward to sharing more in the coming months on ways to improve your talent processes and about how UltiPro can get you there.

Musings of a Product Manager: There is No Bug Juice at this Camp

Kellie Jones
Product Manager, Payroll
Ultimate Software

But who needs bug juice when there are Sublime Doughnuts at Product Camp? For those that are unfamiliar, Product Camp is a type of BarCamp, which is an international network of user-generated conferences. The conferences are open, participatory-style workshops where participants provide content. So in this case, it’s a product management conference, organized by and for product mangers.

I’ve had the privilege of attending the Atlanta events, which have upwards of 300 participants that willingly give up their Saturday to teach and learn from one another. And this year I’m stoked to be on the planning committee. Some past event sessions have included: Collaborative Product Planning, 7 keys to being a Great Agile Product Manager, It’s PowerPoint Karaoke! and The Blended Art of Leadership, Narratives and Aligning Purpose. We get to vote on the sessions we’d most like to attend, the schedule is drawn up on the spot, and attendees get to pick from a variety of sessions just like any other conference. Except it’s free (thank you sponsors!).

It’s awesome to learn and network with everyone there. Imagine a level of engagement and passion in a community of professionals that are willing to spend time outside of their jobs to organize an event, create session content, and give up a beautiful weekend in Atlanta to learn from each other. Some product management professionals will even travel to other parts of the country to learn from those outside of their immediate community. Next on my list is the Seattle product camp. (Do you hear that noise? It’s my propeller spinning on my cap).

I’m able to take back this information and use it readily in my job at Ultimate. I strongly believe it makes me a better team member. I always come back re-energized and the connections I make are invaluable. It’s great to talk to people outside your organization and discuss (ok, sometimes commiserate) shared problems and opportunities. It not only allows me to improve but also to understand what challenges my peers are facing in the event I’m faced with them someday.

Applying what I learn to work is easy. For example, after walking out of the session on The Blended Art of Leadership, I met with the lead of my development team. We worked together on how to align our product vision so that I could communicate in a meaningful way to the rest of the development team (Think numbers!). The team is much more engaged when they understand the value of what we’re all working on.

This is a lesson for product management and the importance of continually learning and applying best practices, but it’s not just for product managers. We’re also in the business of people. If you’re looking to get the most from your people, I challenge you as an employer to help them develop this level of engagement in their professional careers. I challenge you as an employee to take accountability for your own growth and connect with members of your professional community and continue to learn new ways of doing things. You’ll love what you do and your business will benefit from it, like I believe Ultimate benefits from empowering our people.

Now back to my day job! And maybe a doughnut.

Implementing Social Collaboration Tools in Your Organization

Sharlyn Lauby
HR Bartender



A key component to developing a high-performing workplace is sharing. Being able to share information in an effortless way builds strong teams and enhances the team performance. Social media creates opportunities for people to use a medium that is very natural and comfortable to communicate.

But over the relatively short period in time corporations have been using social media, something has happened. We’ve created silos. There are networks for social goals and social projects. Even more for social tracking. The key to breaking down these silos is integration.

Ultimate Software and Yammer, an enterprise social network, have recently announced a partnership to create that integration. The vision is to use Yammer’s collaborative tools to connect employees with the organization in a social way, for the benefit of everyone involved.

Here’s an example: let’s say the company’s sales team is working on a presentation for a major prospective client. In preparing for the meeting, they’ve run into a challenge. Sitting around the conference room table, someone says “Gosh, we can’t be the only team who has faced this challenge before. It would be great to know what other teams have done.”

Instead of calling around hoping to find an answer, organizations can now use social collaboration tools to pose their questions and get answers. Maria Ogneva, director of community for Yammer, explains how social collaboration benefits the business. “The possibilities are endless, and the most important thing is to understand what business problem you are trying to solve. As today’s rapid pace of change increases, companies must adapt faster and faster just to remain in the same place, let alone get ahead of the competition. Adapting to the speed with which you need to move to stay ahead of the competition is simply not possible when the people who need to execute on the vision aren’t on the same page and are hindered by archaic processes. Besides, you often don’t know where the best answer lives; you may be surprised.”

Not only do social collaboration tools help solve business problems, but they contribute to employee satisfaction and engagement. Ogneva says sharing information leads to less frustration and allows employees to easily get their work done.  “Social collaboration helps employees feel like they are part of a larger goal, like everyone is marching to the beat of the same drum. It also reduces the barriers created by hierarchies and flattens the organization, providing insight into what other teams (and management) are doing and thinking. When the leadership team is able to be more open and honest not simply about what’s happening, but why – employees are more compelled to support the overarching business problems and execute on the vision.”

Implementing a social collaboration tool reaps many benefits. Before introducing social tools within an organization, here are some points to consider.

• Understand your corporate culture.
• Look at current processes: how information is obtained and shared within the organization.
• Define what success will look like using social collaboration tools.
• Get support from senior leadership and key stakeholders.
• Create an implementation and communication strategy for the roll-out. Be sure to include employee training on the social collaboration tools!
• Establish a schedule to evaluate and monitor progress.

Social collaboration tools can bring a tremendous amount of information and knowledge to an organization. The key is harnessing it to solve business issues. Ogneva reminds us to focus on the success metric. “For any business social effort to be successful, it has to tie to a business objective. You know it’s bringing positive results when you are getting closer to meeting these objectives.  What do you want to enable with this collaboration? If your goal is to increase customer satisfaction, perhaps the business impact metric you are looking for is the increase of speed of a response to a customer, and how collaboration helps you do that.”

To learn more about social collaboration tools and how they can benefit your company, check out the Yammer blog and talk with your Ultimate Software representative.

Better Together

Andrew McCarthy
Vice President, Market Strategy

Ultimate Software

Better together. That’s Ultimate’s philosophy around our technology and product partnerships. (And yes, we have a bunch of Jack Johnson fans here too).

Today we’re introducing the Ultimate Partner Network, a formalized program to open UltiPro more broadly to the hundreds of solutions that depend on us for accurate, up to the moment information on people at work. 

As Adam noted, we currently support more than 8,000 connections between UltiPro and other systems. Our partner program simply takes that network a step further, offering organizations best-in-class options for extending UltiPro in key areas like corporate social networks, compensation, and learning management.

The success of the program couldn’t have been more evident than at our annual Connections conference. This year we had over 20 partners in attendance, demonstrating their solutions and presenting and participating in sessions with over 1,200 UltiPro customers. That connection and engagement is a vital part of the cloud community, above and beyond the products and technology.

To our customers, welcome. And to our partners, thank you for all your efforts in making this possible!